All posts tagged Amazon

Jack Ma’s come a long way from the spartan apartment he once maintained in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, where the former English teacher first started Alibaba.com in 1999.

Now, his e-commerce is an Internet mammoth nearing a giant milestone: a hotly anticipated initial public offering in the U.S. that could raise about $15 billion from investors, just shy of what Facebook Inc. sold when the social-networking firm went public in 2012. Read More »

A comparison between the latest earnings from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and those from U.S. Internet companies offers some clues to understanding the Chinese e-commerce giant.

Calling Alibaba China’s Amazon.com Inc. is for the most part misleading, as the Chinese company’s business model is different from Amazon, eBay Inc. or any other U.S. e-commerce competitors. In some ways, the Chinese company, which serves as an advertising platform for numerous entrepreneurs that rely heavily on Alibaba to generate traffic for their online retail operations, bears some similarities to Google Inc.

Your daily roundup of the best of The Wall Street Journal’s China coverage:

Chinese leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping seeks to highlight the benefits of U.S.-China commercial ties in visits to Iowa and Los Angeles; Amazon removes iPads from its Chinese website; China is set to move past India as the world’s largest gold buyer. Read More »

In China, Alibaba Group’s Taobao.com has become the primary destination for online shoppers who often claim they can get “anything” on the Web site. Perhaps the most outrageous example of a listing turned up earlier this month when someone put a baby for sale for 1 yuan, apparently as a joke. Another new listing offers for sale Barnes & Noble’s $259 Nook e-reader, which isn’t set to ship officially until Nov. 30. Read More »

Figuring out when Web sites have been blocked by governments is an imprecise science.

Herdict

HerdictWeb, a site run by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, collects outage reports around the world.

Take, for example, Wednesday, when some Chinese Internet users began reporting an inability to access Amazon.com, the U.S. Web site for the online retail giant. Yet Amazon (AMZN) spokesman Craig Berman said that “nothing happened.”

To back up the claim in blog posts and Twitter discussions, Chinese Internet users and watchers pointed to Herdict Web, a four-month-old system run by the Berkman Center at Harvard University, which aggregates reports of Web site accessibility into one database. On Wednesday, 12 reports on Herdict claimed Amazon.com was inaccessible in China, and as of the time of this posting three claim it is back up. The reports came from users all over the country, including people whose Internet service providers are in Beijing, Shanghai, Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Ningbo and Tianjin.

They didn’t report any trouble accessing Amazon’s Chinese site Joyo. Read More »

Expert Insight

New rules on labor negotiations in southern China offer a potential solution to the country's growing problem with labor unrest while at the same time illustrating the difficulty the Communist Party faces in effectively addressing workers’ grievances.

For much of the last half-century, changing China through economic reform seemed to make far better sense than transforming the country through political revolution. Xi Jinping is trying to flip that on its head.

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